Jackie Leven has had a colourful life. The Fife-born singer-songwriter once led the feted band Doll By Doll, who he says never achieved success because they were more interested in chasing "a terrible beauty" than writing platinum albums. In 1983 he was slashed across the throat as he walked down a street in London: he couldn't speak for months and his unmistakable falsetto was lost. Shattered, he spent years losing his pain in heroin before founding a charity for addicts. Then his long-term girlfriend and charity co-founder ran off with the Dalai Llama's bodyguard.
However, these remarkable experiences have provided the inspiration for scores of great, warped songs, and hearing Leven perform them - voice now recovered to a coruscating, metamorphosing tremor - is an unforgettable experience. The man could fill venues with his presence: 52, big and beautifully damaged, with his socks rolled up over his trousers, looking like a great, confused creature who just wandered in off the moor. He is a true modern troubadour, and this is just another stop in his career journey from pub to pub, fiasco to adventure.
Dark, twisted songs such as Heroin Dealer Blues from his new album, Shining Sister Shining Brother, form about a third of the show. The rest of the time Leven introduces them with often entirely unrelated stories that are compulsive and hilarious. He has had to laugh and people roar along - with jaws dropping quietly to the floor - at tales of how Leven alienated the entire city of Munich, the time his partner mistook dog food for his excreta, and a budgerigar called Cunt.
Alternating between triple vodka-and-lime and lager without any dip in sharpness, Leven's prime territory is the surreal netherworld of pubs and alcoholism, and he is fascinated by people who have "the despair of poverty bleeding into their life". He romanticises Glasgow's wonderfully-titled Shat Inn, but a bleak horror haunts songs like Three O'Clock Men and Dustelegia, about a hapless dreamer and small time dealer who was shot dead. Leven is like a cocktail of Van Morrison, Nick Drake and Irvine Welch. The humour and the horror increase exponentially, until you literally don't know whether to laugh or cry, and many end up doing both.
· At Port Mahon, Oxford (01865 202067) tomorrow.
